Quotations

"The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist."

— Simon Wiesenthal,  Austrian Nazi hunter, born December 31, 1908

"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it."

— Simon Wiesenthal, Austrian Nazi hunter, born December 31, 1908

"It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talkies instead of the other way around."

— Mary Wigman, German dancer, died September 18, 1973

"Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter. What do people go to the theater for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that."

— Mary Wigman, German dancer, died September 18, 1973

"Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories."

— Mary Wigman, German dancer, born November 13, 1886

"Outside the open window, the morning air is all awash with angels."

— Richard Wilbur, American poet, born March 1, 1921

"As a queen sits down, knowing that a chair will be there, or a general raises his hand and is given the field-glasses, step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you."

— Richard Wilbur, American poet, died October 14, 2017

"Love much. Earth has enough of bitter in it."

— Ella Wilcox, American poet, died October 30, 1919

"A weed is but an unloved flower."

— Ella Wilcox, American poet, born November 5, 1850

"The sick do not ask if the hand that smoothes their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."

— Oscar Wilde, Irish writer, born 1854

"I feel very Jewish, and I feel very grateful to be Jewish. But I don't believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion."

— Gene Wilder, American actor, born June 11, 1933